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Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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Colin Judge: Testing structural materials in Idaho’s newest hot cell facility
Idaho National Laboratory’s newest facility—the Sample Preparation Laboratory (SPL)—sits across the road from the Hot Fuel Examination Facility (HFEF), which started operating in 1975. SPL will host the first new hot cells at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC) in 50 years, giving INL researchers and partners new flexibility to test the structural properties of irradiated materials fresh from the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) or from a partner’s facility.
Materials meant to withstand extreme conditions in fission or fusion power plants must be tested under similar conditions and pushed past their breaking points so performance and limitations can be understood and improved. Once irradiated, materials samples can be cut down to size in SPL and packaged for testing in other facilities at INL or other national laboratories, commercial labs, or universities. But they can also be subjected to extreme thermal or corrosive conditions and mechanical testing right in SPL, explains Colin Judge, who, as INL’s division director for nuclear materials performance, oversees SPL and other facilities at the MFC.
SPL won’t go “hot” until January 2026, but Judge spoke with NN staff writer Susan Gallier about its capabilities as his team was moving instruments into the new facility.
R. Coelho, S. Matejcik, P. McCarthy, E. P. Suchkov, F. S. Zaitsev, EU-IM Team, ASDEX Upgrade Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 69 | Number 3 | May 2016 | Pages 611-619
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-177
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An important direction of fusion research is the reconstruction of plasma equilibrium from measurements. Most of the plasma modeling codes and plasma control systems use equilibrium data on input. Therefore, the accuracy of reconstructions plays a crucial role in fundamental understanding of processes in present-day devices and fusion reactors. The results of previous research show that one can get substantially different reconstructions of plasma current densities and safety factors, which fit the measurements even within a relatively small inaccuracy. So, rigorous calculation of the reconstructed function error bars is required. This paper presents new advances in formulation of the equilibrium reconstruction problem for the epsilon-net (ε-net) framework, describes application of the ε-net technique for rigorous calculation of the reconstruction error bars and its implementation in the European Integrated Modeling (EU-IM) platform, and gives examples of error bar evaluation for ASDEX Upgrade concentrating on the plasma pressure constraint analysis.